In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes. –Judges 21:25
The human heart has never changed. Ironically, in our secular times humanity, in the main, has come to believe that we have “progressed” beyond our primitive forebears. Secular humanity of the 21st century generally maintains that it has moved beyond the religious platitudes and superstitions of the pre-critical past, and moved onto greener and more enlightened pastures. But the secular age, in fact, is really just a mythology that needs to be demythologized by the lights of sound and theological consideration. This is what TF Torrance provides for us, as he sketches the inherent dualism that reigns over the spirit of the modern age. Dualism in the sense that the human spirit, in the secular, has been abstracted from its ground in its antecedent life, as that has been gifted to it through the Word of God. As TFT notes, the secular human has taken what once was an attribute of the living God, and immanentized it, or collapsed that attribute into the recesses of their own enslaved consciouses. As TF underscores, secular humanity has taken what was the genuine possession of the Creator, and attributed it to themselves. That is the capacity to determine the right way for oneself; the self curved into the depths of its own subjectivity, as if it alone knows and self-determines the good and the beautiful; or the distinction between the holy and profane.
Torrance writes the following:
The story of that development need not detain us further, but we may glance at two significant stages in it. The first of these is the immense impact of Cartesian dualism upon Protestant Christianity—that was an influence from the side of Roman Catholic philosophy, but it had its strongest impact in Protestantism where there had been asserted such a clear distinction between Grace and nature, the Creator and the creature. Once that distinction became distorted into a dualism, it tended to breed Deism, and Deism provoked the old antithesis of spirit and matter, and rampant spiritualism broke loose only to find itself faced with the menace of a positivistic and mechanistic interpretation of nature. It was in the midst of this that there took place the great ‘Copernican revolution’ initiated by Kant, which presents us with the other significant stage in the development of Protestantism which we must note. This is the stage in which the categorical imperative is identified with the self-legislating ego, the divine Spirit is identified with rational self-consciousness, or the inwardness of the human spirit, and out of which it lives, is the ‘Word’ which it hears in the depths of its own subjectivity.
The ’God’ of this Neo-Protestantism is the God who is correlated with the religious subject and its spiritual potentialities, the God who meets and satisfies the needs and answers the questions of ‘modern man’ (that creature that takes himself so frightfully seriously and imposes himself upon everything). Truth about Him is discerned within the religious subject himself, so that the business of theology is to examine the structure of the religious consciousness, particularly—so the stress developed as the nineteenth century wore on—in its historical and universal manifestations. It was within this context that Christianity was subjected to such exhaustive historico-psychological examination in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which mean that Christianity was regarded essentially as a process, while the Reformation was regarded simply as a development in that process, when the essence of religion in the human spirit began to break free from its childhood bondage under external authority and the sovereignty of the inward religious experience was asserted, and its right constantly to create for itself new forms through which to express itself in ‘modern culture’.
In this light it was inevitable that Christianity even in its origins should have been interpreted as the product of the human spirit, and so from Strauss to Bultmann the thesis has been maintained that the Gospel does not go back so much to Jesus Himself as to the creative spirituality of the early Church, and therefore if we are to be true to Jesus who in His way provoked that creation we ought to create new forms of Christianity for our own day. This whole conception has been helped on immensely by the application of the concept of evolution to the development of the religious spirit and by the new ‘modern’ notion of history, stemming from Dilthey, as that which man himself creates and for which he is responsible. Thus the historical truth of the Christian faith is only that which man can envisage for himself, what he can make real for himself, and for which he can make himself responsible through his own decisions. Christian truth is that which has become and continues to become true in and through the history which man himself creates by his existential decisions. That is the only reality which he can acknowledge—that is to say, whatever submits to the creativity of his active reason.[1]
In general, when Christians deconstruct in the 21st century, and reconstruct as Exvangelicals or progressive Christians, the aforementioned, as developed by TFT, in regard to the history of ideas, and their application to the human experience in the secular culture today, are the mechanics it obtains within. It’s really just the age-old story of the Genesis 3 narrative, and the fall of humanity into a dissolved status before God. It is the partaking of the forbidden fruit, over and again, whereby humanity believes the lie that the first Adam bit into; i.e., that we can be like God, knowing both good and evil. When the culture writ large, shorn of its ground in the living and triune God as its, attempts to exist in and from themselves, it is the intellectual hardware Torrance has identified for us, whereby a self-actualized person in the 21st century instantiates itself.
[1] Thomas F. Torrance, Theological Science (Oxford/London/New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 82–3.